“Yellow Submarine” premieres in the US

‘Yellow Submarine’ Roots in Surrealism

A fascination for the cinematographic process has inspired modern artists since Marcel Duchamp pained his “Nude Descending the Staircase” 56 years ago.

With the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” — the most stupendous animation feat in decades—filmmaker Al Brodax has finally reciprocated by surrounding his heroes and their psychedelic world with a veritable compendium of art styles from Beardsley to Pop.

The ingenious German designer Heinz Edelmann also remembers the satirical drawings of Wilhelm Busch and of the Simplicissimus.

The total impact of the film with its theme of nonsense as wisdom adds up to a thoroughly Surrealistic experience not only through the recognizable graphic roots provided by De Chirico, Dali, Magritte and Ernst but by its overabundance of visual and verbal puns.

The interpolation of realistic happenings with the over-all dreamlike odyssey undertaken by the Beatles is related closely to the tenets of Dada and Surrealism. Nearly every frame reveals the influence of original or latter-day adherents to these irrational yet sanity-saving ideas as they puncture all pedantic considerations.

This phantasmagoric underwater journey, with its resultant sense of euphoria, is consistent with efforts by most 20th-century artists to delve beneath surface realities.

As we are in more and more danger of “overthink,” the need to give our senses a break and our chattering minds a rest gives credence to the cartoonist’s utopia of love, color and music. If such often neglected needs are made abundantly clear in this comic classic, then perhaps even greater need for unbounded imagination and uninhibited laughter is amply fulfilled rine.”

When threatened with our own blue meanies, music and color, love and laughter will surely chase them away, at least for a while. If my first encounter with “Yellow Submarine” seemed nearly overwhelming to the senses, a second viewing brought out marvelously funny tricks of draftsmanship, spacing and color that add to the total magic of this cinematic marvel.

From The Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1968

Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ Called Movie for Every Member of Family

NEW YORK – “Yellow Submarine” is the Beatles’ first feature-length cartoon, designed, for the most part beautifully by Heinz Edelmann, in styles ranging through Steinberg, Arshile Gorky, Bob Godfrey (of the short film “The Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit”), the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and — mainly, really — the spirit and conventions of the Sunday comic strip. The Phantom appears. So do many other pop art and comics characters.

The story concerns the kingdom of Pepperland, invaded by the Blue Meanies, the only antidote to whom is music. There are 12 songs, most of them from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and it becomes clear throughout the film not only that the rhythm of movie direction (by George Dunning) and the rhythms of music are meant for each other, but also that any human occasion demands — before pictures, before prose even — something in music.

“Do you ever get the feeling…?”

“Yeh.”

“That things are not as rosy as they appear to be underneath the surface.”…

‘‘There’s a cyclops!”; “but he’s got two eyes! A bicyclops; “Black, blue, white, red. Can I take my friend to bed” (“Can I bring my friend to tea” is another refrain); “tell us where we’re at,” the Socratic question — the whole movie, alternately washed and hard edge, art nouveau and full of flowering shrubs and thistles, is full of enfolded meanings, jokes, puns — none of them aggressive, pretentious or self-indulgent — that would delight a child, or a head or anybody who loves and admires the Beatles, even though this is a film in which they either redo old songs or appear once, in person, briefly, in one of their worst acted appearances ever.

There are completely lovely visual ideas: A fish with hands, which swims breast stroke; a consumer creature with a trumpet snout, who ingests the whole world; decanting people out of a glass ball, by means of a hole that has been picked up from an op polka-dot field of rightside up and upside-down holes; a submarine that is convertible into a bravely smiling fish; a foil that disgorges a cavalry charge against Indians, and a cigarette lighter. The dan-tesque landscape of other worldly types; the Alice in Wonder-land snails; mushrooms; trains emerging from undersinks; bleachings of color from hyperactive corridors; teeny weeny meanies, and particularly the thistles are drawn with such care and amiability by Heinz Edelmann. (He is not so good on people or anthropomorphic types: They tend to popeye distortions below the waist, and undistinguished faces above.) Not a great film, after all but truly nice.

“Yellow Submarine” is a family movie in the truest sense-something for the little kids who watch the same soil of pun ning stories, infinitely less nonviolent and refined, on television; something for the older kids, whose musical contribution to the arts and longings for love and gentleness and color could hardly present a better case; something for parents, who can see the best of what being newly young is all about.

From The San Bernardino County Sun – November 16, 1968